The Fuse
Superintendent Uzi Levy first learned that he would be the next Ya’mas commander in the summer of 2000. Levy, a tall and gregarious officer whose wild hair stood out in the crowd of counterterrorist officers who always wore theirs close-cropped, had spent four years in the IDF’s 35th Paratroop Brigade before volunteering for the Ya’ma’m. He spent nineteen years as an operator in the Israeli counterterrorist unit, first as a team sergeant and then as an officer. He rose up the chain of command inside the insular force to the rank of Ya’ma’m’s deputy commander. The Ya’ma’m had been pretty much all that Levy had known about the world of counterterrorism, and he had mixed feelings and an emotional conflict about assuming the position as Ya’mas commander.
Eight years earlier, on the night of August 26, 1992, Levy had been the on-call Ya’ma’m squadron commander when the unit received an emergency call for assistance to rescue Ya’mas commanding officer Eli Avram, who had been shot in a house in the eastern neighborhood of Jenin. By the time Levy and his Ya’ma’m operators reached Jenin, it appeared as if the entire IDF was there, including elements from a half-dozen commando units. But with two heavily armed terrorists held up inside a fortified location, the operation to rescue Avram, or to retrieve his body, was given to the Ya’ma’m.
Levy recalled the ferocity of the room-to-room battle inside No. 211. The two Black Panther terrorists made the Ya’ma’m fight for every inch of the building. The flash of hundreds of rounds being fired at close range illuminated the thick cloud of plaster debris and smoke that injected itself into the darkness. The two Palestinians had fortified themselves with enough ammunition to hold off an army, and they sprayed magazine-emptying bursts of M16 fire at the advancing members of the Ya’ma’m team trying to reach the mortally wounded undercover commander. The Ya’ma’m had to pull the residents out of the building and out of the kill zone, while at the same time pushing deeper into the apartment block to try to get to the staircase where Avram’s body lay. A surgical team, the best that the IDF had, was rushed to Jenin just in case Avram was still alive. But the Ya’mas commander was dead—just getting to Avram’s body took hours of sustained fighting. Ya’ma’m’s K9 handlers dispatched two highly trained assault dogs toward the rear rooms of the second floor where the two Palestinians had barricaded themselves, but the terrorists shot both animals dead.1 It would be just before dawn, after four hours of incessant combat, that the two Palestinians were killed and a Ya’mas team could retrieve the body of their commander. Avram was brought out on a stretcher as the first hint of dawn cast its orange embers over Jenin. A woolen olive-drab blanket covered his face.2
That night in Jenin forever changed the procedural approach to how Israel’s special operations units assaulted locations during terrorist arrest operations. A new tactic, the Seer Lahatz, or Pressure Cooker, was introduced whereby forces would surround a location with significant firepower. An Arabic-speaking operator would call for all women and children to remove themselves from any location where a terrorist had barricaded himself; if the civilians refused to leave, they would be removed from harm’s way. In case the barricaded suspect refused to surrender, a D9 bulldozer would be on standby within eyeshot of the area; the IDF’s fleet of Caterpillar D9R dozers were heavily armored to make them blast- and bullet-resistant in order to work under fire against entrenched and fortified military targets. The IDF D9, known as the Dubi, or Teddy Bear, was modified with an indigenously designed and produced armor system, consisted of both transparent and opaque components that provided bullet and blast protection to the mechanical systems and to the operator cabin. The D9’s two-man crew, an operator and a commander, were protected inside an armored cabin shielded from blasts and machine gun and sniper fire by thick panels of armored steel and bulletproof glass; other armor, throughout the vehicle and adding fifteen tons to its overall weight, protected the D9 from RPGs, land mines, and IEDs. If the terrorist resisted, or if the situation became too dangerous to continue with the siege, the D9 would be summoned and flatten the building. The lives of Israeli soldiers and policemen were deemed too valuable to risk in assaults against adversaries determined to die. Levy had seen this new protocol implemented in the Ya’ma’m playbook many times in the years after Avram’s death.
When Levy arrived at the unit’s headquarters, memories of the night that Eli Avram was killed filled his mind. Avram’s legacy was iconic. It was an unenviable position to be in—especially as the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians would dictate the future of the unit—now his unit.
The summer of 2000 was one of the hotter seasons on record in Israel. The Sharav, the harsh desert winds that brought temperatures above and beyond 100°F made too many appearances in July and August, and it was more than many Israelis—and Palestinians—could bear. There was unease in Israel—the almost forbidden desire to hope played on the nerves of those who were optimistic about the future.
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U.S. president Bill Clinton was in regal glory as he shuttled from cottage to cottage in the shady summer breeze at Camp David, buried deep inside Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Park. He and his staff rushed after him, hoping to bring Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak ever so close to a historic breakthrough. Clinton was at the end of an eight-year presidency where, beyond scandals and bitter fights with his political opponents, the one lasting image of his legacy was standing between Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn as they shook hands on September 13, 1993. With only months left in his second term, Clinton was determined to outdo himself and once and for all end the bitter conflict between Palestinian and Israeli. The best laid plans of outsiders, though, have a long and bloody history of backfiring in the no-man’s-land of Arab-Israeli logjams.
Because Ehud Barak, like his mentor Yitzhak Rabin, had been an IDF chief of staff and was a man with unimpeachable defense credentials, it was thought that he—and, perhaps, he alone—could succeed in selling finalized peace deals to the Israeli electorate. In May 2000, Barak had seen to it that the last of the Israeli forces departed Lebanon after eighteen long and bloody years of conflict and loss. Barak’s political opponents, primarily the head of the right-wing Likud opposition, Ariel Sharon, viewed the unilateral Israeli withdrawal as a sign of defeat. Barak didn’t care. Israel’s presence in Lebanon had produced more misery than security. Barak wanted to end the Palestinian stalemate with pragmatic vigor.
For two weeks, from July 11 to July 25, President Clinton, his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and special Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, made a Herculean effort to bring the Palestinian and Israeli leaders to agreement. The tension between the two distant sides was impassable. In one of the more memorable scenes from the marathon that was captured by news film crews, Clinton, Barak, and Arafat faced an etiquette tussle to see which one of the leaders—Israeli or Palestinian—would politely allow his counterpart through a door first. Like all matters Palestinian-Israeli, politeness soon gave way to a tugging match, and it appeared in the end as if Barak manhandled Arafat and shoved him to the negotiating table; and, in the eyes of many Palestinians, since Barak had played a part—either directly pulling the trigger or commanding the operation from afar—in the killing of many of Arafat’s deputies along the way, the move struck a resonant chord of coercion. But perception mattered little. The two weeks of haggling were for naught. Both the Israelis and the Americans would later claim that Arafat wasn’t ready, willing, or perhaps able, to make the final deal with Israel. The Palestinians claimed that the Israelis and Americans weren’t ready to make full-blown concessions. The Israelis, with American support, went for an all-or-nothing approach; Barak even offered what was for him a political knife to the jugular—to divide Jerusalem so that the eastern part of the city could serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Arafat balked.
The talks ended in abysmal failure. Mont Blanc pens, specially prepared for the signing of a document, were returned to their hardened cases.
President Clinton never achieved his dream of ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Barak achieved little other than to spark a fire under the looming bulldozer of Ariel Sharon, the head of the right-wing Likud party, who now sensed that his political opponent was vulnerable. Arafat and the Palestinian Authority felt humiliated by the equation of a conference where two superpowers—one global and the other regional—attempted to force him into a final deal when he needed nothing more than a minor success of his brinksmanship. The Palestinians prepared for the violence that would inevitably follow.
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Uzi Levy wasn’t the only Israeli security commander being promoted that volatile season. On May 4, 2000, Avi Dichter was appointed the new Shin Bet director. A former protégé of Ehud Barak’s in Sayeret Mat’kal, Dichter began his Shin Bet career as a sky marshal for El Al Israel Airlines, and then in 1974, after completing an extensive Arabic-language immersion and training, he began to serve in a variety of counterterrorist postings, primarily in a regional command responsible for the Gaza Strip; his special operations skills were unique, though, and he remained unofficially attached to the commando unit for many years.3 He had played, according to accounts, a critical role in the January 1996 operation in which a booby-trapped cellular phone was handed off to Yehiya Ayyash, the original Hamas engineer, as he hid from Israeli forces in Palestinian Authority–controlled Gaza. Ayyash’s targeted killing, by way of true Le Carré deception, sparked a wave of retaliatory suicide bombings, but was considered a master stroke of Israel’s domestic intelligence service. Dichter, along with most of his senior commanders, grew up during the first intifada, and they had persevered—some truly excelled—in the war against Hamas and the PIJ during the terrible three years of suicide bombings. They knew the importance of relentlessly targeting high-value terrorist targets—both during times of relative quiet and when buses were blowing up in downtown Jerusalem.
In August 2000, a handful of high-value targets populated the Shin Bet most-wanted lists, but one name made it to the top: Mahmoud Abu Hanoud. Abu Hanoud was born in 1967 in Asira ash-Shamaliya, a village near Nablus. The fourth of seven children, he dreamed of studying the Koran and becoming the village imam. But he was shot by Israeli forces during disturbances in 1988, at the height of the first intifada, and he joined the ranks of Hamas. Following the kidnapping and murder of an Israeli policeman in 1992, Abu Hanoud and 414 other top Hamas commanders were deported from their homes in the West Bank and Gaza and dumped in the no-man’s-land of southern Lebanon in between Israeli and Hezbollah forces. The “415,” as the Hamas deportees became known, forged links with Hezbollah operatives and Iranian Revolutionary Guardsmen who taught the Palestinians the A-to-Zs of bomb-building and suicide bombing tactics. Shortly after Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin allowed the 415 to return to their homes—President Clinton4 had demanded it—the first Hamas suicide bombing campaign began. Abu Hanoud led much of the Hamas infrastructure in and around Nablus.
On July 30, 1997, Abu Hanoud dispatched two suicide bombers to Jerusalem’s bustling Mahane Yehuda Market at lunchtime, when it would be the most crowded. The bombers were dressed in black ties and white shirts, posing as lawyers, and they wore yarmulkes to masquerade as Orthodox Jews. The first bomber, equipped with five kilograms of TATP homemade explosives, triggered his device near a food stand. The second bomber detonated his package of ten kilograms of high explosives wrapped up with nails and screws three minutes later, targeting the first responders he knew would arrive. Sixteen people were killed and 178 critically wounded. A month later, Abu Hanoud dispatched three suicide bombers on a simultaneous assault on Jerusalem’s trendy Ben Yehuda Street shopping promenade. Five people, including three teenage girls, were killed in the bombings; two hundred people were critically wounded. The bombers had all come from Asira ash-Shamaliya.
Mahmoud Abu Hanoud understood just how high a priority a target he was and he acted accordingly. He rejected traveling with the large signature entourage of heavily armed bodyguards, and preferred to rely on one trusted man, always a relative, to watch his back. He changed his mobile phone daily, and he never used the same SIM card more than once. He trusted his wits and the thirty-round magazine of his always handy AK-47 assault rifle, and carried two hand grenades on his body at all times. On more than one occasion, the Israelis came close to cornering him in one of his safe houses, but when commandos kicked in the door, all they found was a hot kettle on the stove and a half-eaten plate of warm food on the kitchen table. His penchant for always being one step ahead of Israel special operations units had earned him the nickname of rajol bi saba’ arwah: the “man with seven lives.” The Shin Bet invested enormous resources to try to ascertain his location.
Asira ash-Shamaliya was a ten-minute drive from Nablus and was quite affluent by West Bank standards—historically, the nearby forests had provided a lucrative lumber trade. More recently, though, the village had become a desired location for Palestinians who had emigrated to the United States years ago and now had come back to build second homes. Only one road, the 5715, entered and exited the small village. But it was no longer really small. Numerous new multi-story buildings and multi-family apartment blocks, built with wealth from the American Diaspora, had transformed the once-rural landscape into an urban bottleneck ideal for use as kill zones. Asira ash-Shamaliya was also a Hamas stronghold.
Asira ash-Shamaliya was in Area B, an administrative zone created by the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that granted the Palestinians civil control over certain locations near major West Bank cities. In Area B, the security was handled by the Palestinian police, with overall Israeli security control still the responsibility of the Israeli military. Area A consisted of the towns and cities of the Palestinian Authority in which Arafat’s security services and his civil servants maintained full control; and Area C was under complete Israeli civil and security administration.
In late August, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud surfaced—or, more accurately, the Shin Bet gained a lead on his whereabouts. Sensitive operations, those with genuine military repercussions, had to be approved by the head of a regional command, a major general, or even the IDF chief of staff. Operations that could swing the political pendulum into a crisis had to be approved by either the defense minister or even the prime minister. The various special operations units that worked the counterterrorist beat inside Israel’s order of battle presented their plans to be approved by the military hierarchy—as was standard practice. Brigadier General Shlomo Oren, the commander of the Judea and Samaria Division, was a veteran paratroop officer and he favored utilizing Duvdevan. Oren argued that because any operation in Asira ash-Shamaliya had the potential to develop into a pitched battle, only an army unit, with full army support, could handle any escalation of hostilities. There had been a perception in the unit that there was too much focus on the undercover piece and that it should expand into a more diverse focus on special operations—in 1994, then-Duvdevan commander Ram Rotberg, a naval commando veteran, commented that the “undercover work alone was limiting the unit.”5
Duvdevan was, of course, the larger force and it had greater specialized resources than many of the other specialized units for counterterrorist operations in the West Bank, including the Ya’mas, which was a smaller unit, but professional in design. Oren also had a close-knit relationship with Duvdevan commander Lieutenant Colonel Miki Edelstein, himself a highly decorated special operations officer with a stellar combat record. Sometimes all it took to decide one unit over another was the personal relationships that existed between generals and the unit commanders that lobbied for work. The IDF brass decided to use a chain saw over a scalpel to seize Abu Hanoud. Duvdevan was entrusted with the assignment and the operation was codenamed “Symphony of Life.”
Operation Symphony of Life was planned for Saturday, August 26, 2000. H-Hour was set for 2130. A large piece of the Duvdevan unit, backed by paratroopers, snipers, K9 personnel, and combat engineers, would be in support. With their gargantuan D9 bulldozer, the engineers were particularly good in case of any standoff. The massive D9s could flatten any building and its armed inhabitants. The D9s epitomized psychological terror, and so did the dogs. It was said that the Hamas foot soldiers hated the K9 units because the Koran said dogs were dirty. Between the dogs and the prospect of being crushed by fifty-four tons of Caterpillar steel, even hardcore Hamas commanders usually opted to surrender.
Two Israeli Air Force Cobra attack helicopters would be on standby, as would choppers from the elite paramedic unit, just in case casualties needed to be medevaced to a nearby trauma unit. A drone was launched over Asira ash-Shamaliya to monitor the operation and broadcast it back, via live feed, to the top brass assembled nearby at a makeshift command post.
The Duvdevan operation was split into four interlocked components. Force A, an undercover team of operatives masquerading as locals, was to position itself outside the house where it was suspected Abu Hanoud was hiding. Force B would conceal itself behind a wall connected to a nearby apartment building and cover the rear exits of Abu Hanoud’s hideout. Simultaneously, Force C, several Duvdevan sniper teams, would take rooftop positions on the tallest buildings around the targeted location. Finally, Force D, the tactical backup, consisting of more than fifty Duvdevan operatives and additional paratroopers, in tactical reserve, was in position some three hundred yards away in their armored jeeps, prepared to roll forward in force to assist should a general firefight develop.
Once the undercover element surrounded Abu Hanoud’s house, Force D would close all access to and from the village. The undercover operators would call upon Abu Hanoud to surrender or, failing that, allow any noncombatants to leave his compound. If Abu Hanoud decided to surrender, the troopers would take their prize and return to base by 2300. But there was always the chance for the incident to develop into a Pressure Cooker.
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2130 hours, Saturday August 26, 2000: the Duvdevan vehicles pushed ahead, though slowly, through the main village road and negotiated the throngs venturing out to shop and mingle in the cool of darkness. Young men were everywhere—sitting inside the village’s two coffeehouses, its hummus eateries and religious clubhouses, and just hanging out on the street corner smoking cigarettes. About thirty men, all in soccer jerseys, hovered around the stoop of a storefront, arguing about a match. Women, some leading a procession of six kids or more, were out, as well, shopping for the next day’s meals. Yellow taxi vans, the life’s blood of travel inside Areas A and B, were double- and triple-parked everywhere.
The streets in Asira ash-Shamaliya had no official names, and none of the houses had numbers—such was this Byzantine world. Several streets, though, had been named and labeled prominently in honor of village sons who had been killed battling the Israelis or martyred as suicide bombers. Posters of these men hung everywhere. It took the vehicles several minutes to slink their way toward the affluent section of Asira ash-Shamaliya, situated north of the main mosque; the vans were known as “toaster ovens” because the windows were always sealed and the heat inside was stifling—especially for operators in full tactical kit and constricting body armor. The vans pushed into parking spots twenty-five meters from Abu Hanoud’s two-story home and silently unloaded the men. From the darkened cover of a pine forest a kilometer outside of town, the Duvdevan commander and his men prepared to enter the village. When the main force arrived, a loudspeaker would be used to demand that Abu Hanoud surrender. The entire village would become a closed army zone until Mahmoud Abu Hanoud was either in custody or killed. In keeping with the protocols of the Oslo Peace Accords, a liaison officer would need to visit the Palestinian police station in the village, located in the northeast outskirts, and inform them of the operation once the mission began. There were fifty armed Palestinian policemen representing ten of Arafat’s police and intelligence services in the village. Some were Hamas sympathizers; others were full-fledged operatives.
The undercover operators spread out around the house and quickly took aim with their M4s; their ACOG sights illuminated a red dot on each of the windows and doorways to cover the escape routes. They listened for any signs of life from inside the house, but the building was dark. A television was on. Someone was cooking, banging pots and pans. The teams closed in.
Abu Hanoud and his bodyguard, Nidal Dagles, had taken advantage of the cool mountain breeze and were enjoying the evening in a rooftop lounge they had recently constructed under hanging blankets—blankets that shielded them from any intruding overhead surveillance. Suddenly, they heard the cries of small children yelling “Jesh,” for “Army,” in Arabic. The Hamas chief had employed neighborhood children as lookouts, paying them ten shekels a day, and his force of small trip wires had been worth the modest investment. A grenade exploded near the Duvdevan team positioned in front of the house. The blast was followed by dedicated bursts of small arms and AK-47 fire. The Duvdevan operation had been compromised.
First Sergeant Niv Ya’akobi and Staff Sergeants Ro’i Finsteiner-Even and Liron Sharvit, conscripted NCOs in the unit, reacted instinctively when the sounds of gunfire pierced the night’s calm. At the pre-raid briefing, the operators had been ordered not to change their locations—or rush to the rooftops of the surrounding homes and buildings—under any circumstances unless directed to do so. The three Duvdevan sergeants knew that the unit’s snipers had yet to establish their firing positions and were not in a position to engage Abu Hanoud. They felt that they had to act and act immediately. The three made a dash into a three-story building fifteen yards from the target house, and then made their way to the roof. Testosterone and adrenaline had proven to be a more powerful potion than instructions and restraint.
The three sergeants seized the corners of the building’s first floor, and then each landing of the staircase. As one operator turned a corner, he stopped and provided cover while the other two rushed up. Each move had been rehearsed over and over again in tactical exercises. It was second nature to them: deliberate tactical choreography.
As the three sergeants pushed up the staircase, they heard the full-auto bursts of AK fire from Abu Hanoud and his partner. The three reached the rooftop and identified Abu Hanoud and Dagles some twenty-five meters away. The two Palestinians fired at them—the ricochets of near misses sparkled in the dark night sky. Ya’akobi, Sharvit, and Finsteiner-Even immediately engaged the two Hamas targets with a dedicated response. Tracer rounds careened into the darkness in what looked like green laser beams. The Israelis’ shooting was disciplined and accurate, but not fatal. Abu Hanoud took a bullet to the right shoulder. His sudden movement threw off the Israeli’s aim and kept the round from his punching into his heart. Dagles was hit several times in the left leg and thigh.
Then, without warning, the Duvdevan sergeants were hit by an explosive burst of fire from a nearby rooftop and killed. Unit snipers, fearing that their comrades from Force A on the ground were trapped under fire, had rushed to their rooftop positions and unleashed a barrage of automatic weapons fire. The snipers didn’t know that the three operators had taken the high ground themselves.
Chaos and confusion erupted. The overloaded radio frequency was interrupted by cries coming from the soldiers demanding that their comrades respond and acknowledge. Helicopter gunships were summoned, as was the chopper belonging to the paramedics. The backup forces rushed frantically toward their preplanned positions in and around the targeted house—and the village.
Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, bleeding heavily from a 5.56mm round that punched clean through his right shoulder, took advantage of the Israeli confusion by jumping out a rear window and making a dash for safety; his bodyguard was ordered to hold off the Israelis for as long as he could in order to facilitate the escape.
Duvdevan search teams found a blood trail leading from the targeted house to the west, in the direction of dried brush and the outskirts of town. By now, dozens of flares hung in the night’s sky, turning the darkness into daylight. IDF jeeps equipped with loudspeakers rolled up and down the main road ordering the residents to remain in their homes.
A team of Duvdevan operators followed Abu Hanoud’s blood trail to a small house at the southern outskirts of Asira ash-Shamaliya. They had radioed their position to Lieutenant Colonel Edelstein and requested permission to gain entry, when they heard rustling in the nearby brush and the clanking sound of a sling banging against a weapon. The soldiers swung their weapons toward the new threat and squeezed off several three-round bursts. The rounds lit up the darkened backdrop, and several ricocheted off rocks, which added to the confusion and chaos. But their target, they discovered to their horror, was a member of the unit: Staff Sergeant Avi Yosef was shot in the thigh and arm.
Duvdevan combat medics worked feverishly to resuscitate Ya’akobi, Sharvit, and Finsteiner-Even, but the three were ultimately pronounced dead. News of the friendly-fire tragedy spread quickly over the communications gear worn by each operator.
Throughout the night Duvdevan operators, as well as commandos from a paratroop reconnaissance unit, scoured the village in search of Abu Hanoud or anyone who might know where he went. Young villagers who wandered outside once the gunfire started were quickly rounded up by Duvdevan operators and detained. Dozens of men, blindfolded and hands cuffed behind their backs, were thrown to their knees and readied for Shin Bet interrogation. Arabic-speaking Shin Bet agents pressed those detainees for any news of the Hamas chieftain’s whereabouts.
Abu Hanoud had made it through the brush and into a thicket of pine trees to reach the outskirts of Nablus. He ventured to the safest place for him inside the West Bank—the headquarters of Arafat’s notorious Preventative Security Service—and demanded shelter. He was treated like a conquering hero rather than a man whom the Palestinians had sworn they would arrest on sight. A prominent surgeon was brought to attend to his shattered shoulder, and he was allowed to recuperate inside what was referred to as a jail cell, but in reality was a comfortable VIP guest room equipped with satellite TV, secure phone lines, and computers.
Outside Abu Hanoud’s home, his bodyguard had managed to buy the terror chief time to make good his escape, holding off the Israeli forces for nearly eight hours. Parleying with Duvdevan hostage negotiators, he claimed that there were women and children inside the home and said that he wanted to make sure he would be handled under the guidelines of the Geneva Conventions and not tortured or killed. When Israeli commanders finally determined that Dagles was alone, they summoned the D9. The dozer’s two-man crew fired up the 474-horsepower engine and guided the fifteen-foot-wide armored behemoth up an incline toward the targeted house. Inching forward at seven miles per hour, the D9 crushed an outer stone wall and then moved toward the house. Dagles begged for his life and surrendered moments later.
IDF officers embarked upon the heartbreaking task of notifying three sets of parents that their sons had been killed. Some of the parents were awoken at four-thirty in the morning6 by the dreadful knock in the predawn darkness and the silhouettes of men and women in the uniform aiming their eyes at the ground. Duvdevan, and the Israeli task force, did not leave Asira ash-Shamaliya until 0800 the following morning.
The following day, Lieutenant Colonel Edelstein gave the eulogies at all three funerals. He spoke of what a terrible responsibility of securing the country Israel burdens its eighteen-year-old conscripts with.
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Asira ash-Shamaliya came close to being a mortal wound for Duvdevan. As so often happens when thousands of man hours and the most ambitious of intentions fail to yield dividends because of human error and poor luck, everyone who could began to point fingers. The politicians blamed the generals. The generals, of course, blamed the men in the field. The parents of the fallen soldiers gave interviews to the voracious Israeli press, critiquing the planning and execution of the operation. In one scathing exposé, embittered Duvdevan operators claimed that they had warned of the risk of friendly fire incidents in the past, and that in the unit, there were many instances where the “colorful” force, in disguise, came under fire from the “green” force.7
The viciousness of the infighting was par for the course in Israel, a nation where mandatory military service elevated many to the rank of armchair general. But the nature of special operations—especially the ultra-dangerous world of undercover work—was one of risk and peril, where an operation that has been a year in the planning can self-destruct in seconds because of human error or poor luck. Lost in the blame game was the fact that Duvdevan had executed some two hundred successful counterterrorist operations in the months previous to Asira ash-Shamaliya.8
Both Brigadier General Oren and Lieutenant Colonel Edelstein submitted their resignations to IDF chief of staff Lieutenant General Shaul Mofaz. Only Oren’s was accepted.*
When the raw intelligence on Abu Hanoud first emerged, some inside Israel’s counterterrorism community wanted the Ya’mas to handle the target because of their deft touch and small signature. Indeed, one of the initial findings of the investigation into what went wrong that night in Asira ash-Shamaliya was that too many soldiers were involved in the raid and that overload of the unit’s communications systems added to the confusion and chaos once gunfire erupted.9
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Ya’mas operators, working at their base near where the friendly-fire incident transpired, mourned the young soldiers killed that night and prayed for their families. They knew, perhaps better than anyone else involved in Israel’s unending war on terror, just how dangerous undercover work was; these men, some of them in their late thirties, with a decade’s worth of experience in the fight, knew just how precarious and explosive these operations could be. The operators—the young men in Duvdevan and the older and more experienced specialists in the Ya’mas—were highly skilled and full of motivation, but Murphy’s Law, or the Palestinian variant, was always a factor that could turn a spectacular operation into a debacle. And the generals—and the politicians—were ill-equipped to deal with debacle. Duvdevan would be taken off the line following the friendly-fire debacle, as teams of investigators tried to determine what had gone wrong that awful night near Nablus in Asira ash-Shamaliya.
The arrival of fall is a joyous time in Israel. The weather cools slightly as the harsh summer heat dissipates in greeting the arrival of the Jewish New Year. Rosh Hashanah launches a month of holidays and celebrations that bring the country to a virtual halt. Families gather for gut-busting feasts, schoolchildren receive what to parents appear to be an endless number of days off, and the main national focus seems to be on grocery shopping in preparation for the festive meals and last-minute travel deals for those wishing to spend their religious-inspired time off overseas.
September 2000 went by quickly, some of the Ya’mas veterans thought. The Duvdevan incident reinforced the sense of doom, that of a lit fuse about to ignite an unimaginably explosive force that would engulf the landscape shortly. Intelligence officers who were regulars at the Ya’mas base spoke of increased chatter among the terrorist factions and a lot of “fortifying the nest” on the Palestinian Authority side. There was a tangible tension that was felt everywhere in the terrain—the villages and roadways of Area B where the Ya’mas operated—where the Ya’mas worked. Unit members began to use armored jeeps when leaving base to run an errand, rather than their own vehicles; few traveled the roadways of the area without an M4 close at hand.10 The violent electricity that Yaakov Berman and his most experienced operators felt during the Naqba demonstrations was now high-voltage. Some of the operators had a sixth sense that they wouldn’t be home for the holidays. They hoped that their wives and children would understand.
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On the morning of Thursday, September 28, 2000, a day before the eve of the Jewish New Year, Likud Party leader Ariel Sharon—along with a large force of police and security—ventured to the Temple Mount and the al-Aqsa mosque in a grandstanding display that torpedoed the very notion of Ehud Barak’s offer to divide Jerusalem. Sharon’s gesture was designed to illustrate that the city of Jerusalem, including the third holiest site in Islam, was sovereign Israeli territory and would always remain so. Sharon’s much publicized media event was a political opportunity for Arafat to respond to Camp David and the impass over Barak’s overture the only way he knew. Palestinian rioting throughout East Jerusalem erupted shortly thereafter. The rioting soon spread to the West Bank and Gaza. Rocks and petrol bombs would soon be replaced by automatic weapons and grenades.
Few Ya’mas operators would be home for the New Year. In fact, the unit’s personnel would miss most of the holiday celebrations for the foreseeable future.